At 22.08hrs last night, Monday 22nd December, the Team’s DVSD handler, Dave Marsh, was made aware of a developing search situation in Dumfries, Southern Scotland.

A young male had been reported by three witnesses, as having been swept away in the River Nith, which runs through the centre of Dumfries.

Police, Coastguard and RNLI spent all day yesterday searching for the male with no success.

Dave received the call last night from Search and Rescue Dog Association Southern Scotland, enquiring on his specialist availability for a search commencing early today, Tuesday 23rd December 2014.

Currently (11.00hrs) today, Dave is still on standby to travel up to Scotland and lend his assistance to this search.

With heavy rain forecast for today and early tomorrow, which would result in the river being in spate, safety considerations in deploying Dave and Sasha, and the manner in which they conduct their specialist DVSD search work are paramount.

Dave and Sasha are therefore continuing with their pre-Christmas activities until there has been an improvement in the weather and further information is forthcoming.

This is recorded here for the information and interest of our readers only, and does not currently feature within our Incident listings, unless Dave gets deployed.